On Human Religiosity

Themes: Critique, On Knowing God, Pedagogy

What does it mean to have a sense of God? What kind of sense would this be? Is it a sense, like sight or taste, that is attuned to our environs, focussed on matters of substance? Or is it like a sense of beauty, another kind of ‘taste’ – not so much a perception but a relation to a perceptual order? Is our ‘sense of God’ something that arises from our relation to the world as we find it in the content of other perceptions?

The Cognition, Religion and Theology Project at Oxford University recently completed a major study of the human disposition to believe in gods and an afterlife. At one level, the study appears to have been an exercise in spending large amounts of time and money on proving the blatantly obvious: humanity is incorrigibly religious.¹

The £1.9 million project involved 57 researchers who conducted over 40 separate studies in 20 countries representing a diverse range of cultures. The studies (both analytical and empirical) conclude that humans are predisposed to believe in gods and an afterlife, and that both theology and atheism are reasoned responses to what is a basic impulse of the human mind.

Project Co-Director Professor Roger Trigg:

We have gathered a body of evidence that suggests that religion is a common fact of human nature across different societies. This suggests that attempts to suppress religion are likely to be short-lived as human thought seems to be rooted to religious concepts, such as the existence of supernatural agents or gods, and the possibility of an afterlife or pre-life.’

This last quote is particularly telling and appears to confirm the results of the most rigorous and widespread multi-generational studies of the phenomenon of human religiosity, namely, those undertaken in the systematically atheistic societies of the USSR and China. These cases both provide remarkable data: the USSR unparalleled for geographical expanse and cultural diversity; China for sheer size of population. Both these projects in atheistic social engineering encountered remarkable resistance, and I don’t simply mean that some ‘religious’ people clung fiercely to their beliefs and chose martyrdom rather than apostasy. There were two more innate and (ultimately) more subversive forms of resistance, both of which tend to support the claim that humanity is an inherently religious species.

The first was demonstrated by the persistence of religiosity despite the destruction of its organisational forms. The natural focus for opposition to religion in both the USSR and Communist China were formal religious institutions: Churches, temples, shrines, monasteries, places for the training of the professional religious classes. Many were dealt with brutally. It seems to me that we could frame this an an experimentation upon the hypothesis, that “religiosity is propagated and sustained by religious institutions/classes of people.” The hypothesis was tested with exceptionally severe rigor. I assume that the hypothesis was generated out of the intuition that religion functioned within society as a means by which power was exercised by a few over the many (certainly, Marxist thinkers expressed their intuition in these terms). Religion was a mechanism, alongside private property, access to capital, access to education, through which societies structured their power relations. But if the essence of religion is social control, when one removes the ability of religion to provide this function (by destroying its organisational form and organising ability), religion should die, its superstitious garments simply withering away. But does religion without control implode, like the unmasked Wizard of Oz?

As stated above, this theory was tested. Rigorously. And shown conclusively to be wrong. The human impulse to religiosity is not imposed, generated or sustained by ‘external’ modes of control.² As the atheistic regimes in the USSR and China discovered, the result of the suppression of religious organisations was not the destruction of religion but the destruction of theology or its equivalents: the destruction of rationalised forms of religion. Religiosity continued, even rapidly expanded in some places, but frequently in the form of ‘folk’ religion. The atheist regimes found themselves increasingly battling against cults (and ironically, increasingly found themselves being turned into cults). It became apparent that the religious organisations that had been suppressed were primarily modes of systematisation of religious impulses, not the cause of them.³ And when the various religious organisations were suppressed, the result was not the destruction of religion but its disorganisation. The conclusion appears to be that while the forms in which the religious impulse is expressed may be dependent on systematic religious organisation, and these religious organisations may function as a vehicle of social control (as was recognised with great clarity in Tudor England),  the religious organisation is not the source of general religiosity, it is the result.⁴

The second form of resistance that ‘religiosity’ demonstrated against atheistic attempts to destroy it has been already mentioned: it was the remarkable way in which religious forms insinuated themselves into purportedly ‘atheistic’ social structures and organisations. The more fiercely anti-religious the various Marxist reformation movements became, and the more they were successful in their destruction of organised religion, the more they began to resemble civil religions themselves. The most powerful symbol and example of this atheistic cult was perhaps the embalmed Lenin in Red Square (a source of embarrassment to many of Lenin’s more rigorously Marxist comrades, including his wife). The atheist cult extended to the canonisation and study of particular texts; the posthumous ‘deification’ of particular leaders; Communist Youth Groups (who directly lifted their organisational structures from prior Christian versions); most profoundly, ‘religious’ narratives about time and space, history and country, which were ultimately, religiously constructed narratives of identity. The more vigorously ‘Religion’ was suppressed, the more religion returned. The State increasingly found itself at the centre of popular worship.

I’d like to take some time (at some stage) to explore what this ‘sense of god/the gods’ might be: I don’t propose to leave my opening questions completely unresolved. But even if we set that investigative project to one side, there are a number of interesting implications that flow from the conclusion that humans have a disposition toward religiosity.

First, the common atheistic call for the abandonment of religious education in schools is incredibly naïve. The contemporary militant proponents of atheism routinely argue that religious education is an abuse of religious/parental power, children should not be indoctrinated with religion until their critical faculties have matured to a point where they will be able to (inevitably) reject it as superstitious foolishness. The underlying hypothesis appears to be a version of the one I mentioned above: that “religiosity is propagated through religious institutions (religious education)”, and that humans, if left to their own devices, would be irreligious. Simply put, the best science is against this position. The removal of religious education would not remove religiosity from our children, it would simply deprive them of any contact with collective, systematic, rational reflection on their religiosity. Removing religious education will not make people irreligious, just religious and uneducated.⁵

Secondly, the ‘decline of religion’ in contemporary Western societies is a myth. What we have witnessed is not a decline in religion, but a shift in its expression away from the organised (and sometimes enthusiastically disorganised) modes of reflection that have served our societies over the past century. Christians shouldn’t be particularly shocked by this, while human religiosity is constant, the form in which this is expressed shifts constantly.⁶ Any reading of the Old Testament would establish this claim from the experience of Israel. What is perhaps unusual and interesting about our contemporary situation is the colossal bad faith in which our worship is undertaken. We live in a time, perhaps not unlike the period during which ‘atheistic’ Christianity rose to prominence in the Roman Empire, when the dominant forms of religiosity in our society refuse the label ‘religion’. Where that will end is a matter for others to divine.

All the nations may walk in the name of their gods; we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever. (Micah 4:5 NIV)

Image by Vicki Wolkins

Footnotes
1. It must be said, however, that the Oxford Study was very instructive, not least for the methodology employed and the diversity of samples taken.↑
2. What we mean by ‘external’ at this point is questionable, but probably something along the lines of, not universally shared but imposed by a distinct (minority) group upon the society as a whole↑
3. I do not mean to deny by this that religious organisations can serve other purposes, including social control↑
4. The Chinese communist party has shown itself to be significantly wiser (and more pragmatic) by seeking to control religious organisations rather than simply banning them.↑
5. Those arguing against contemporary forms of religious education would be better advised to bite the bullet and own up to the fact that what they really desire is not a religiously neutral education but an atheistic one, and that atheism (at its best, which is hardly ever) is just as much a systematic, rational reflection on human religiousity as any other form of developed theology.↑
6. I recently came across a fascinating book entitled Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, a study of Oprah as the embodiment of ‘spiritual capitalism’.↑

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Astro-Ignominy

Themes: Apologetics, Critique, The Future

I was having a coffee at Campos today with Emma and casually reading the paper over her shoulder. She was reading the Daily Telegraph (my glasses feel soiled from refracting light beams that have touched that Paper). Emma appears impervious to its evil muck. I noticed this ‘pearl’ from Jonathon Cainer, the Tele Astrologist:

‘Nothing is certain but death and taxes.’ So said American founding father, Benjamin Franklin. His politician’s soundbite still echoes through the centuries, but it omits another certainty: the movements of the planets. Astronomers can say, with confidence precisely where Venus or Mars will be this time next week or even on a given date in 3009. That’s why, for those who seek to foresee the future, the sky is so fascinating. Not everything up there, though, is predictable. Comets for example, can surprise everyone. With each day, it looks more likely that Comet Lulin will soon surprise us all.

Ah, the movements of the Spheres – Aristotle would be so proud. Us, dull sublunary lovers, bound to change and decay can only gaze wistfully at the perfection in motion of the heavenlies. At least we could, until Kepler worked out that the Planets were dancing around in a kind-of Oval shape. It turns out that the level of determination/certainty in the movements of the planets is precisely the same for that of any physical object. Not more or Less.
Which makes the whole business of fortune telling slightly bizzarre and contradictory, as can be seen from my particular horoscope:

‘All things bright and beautiful…’ So goes the popular old hymn. But of course, that’s not all the Good Lord (or Lady) made. The Devil, we are reliably informed by the good book, is a fallen angel. So who made him (or her)? It is all, we are told by those who consider themselves entitled to interpret such things, to do with ‘free will’. We all have it, but we don’t all use it. Currently, you feel as if you have a serious lack of choice. Whatever put you in this position, has also put, within your reach, an opportunity to get out of it.

Hmm, here are three reasons why Jonathan Cainer is a turkey. [sadly, his being this particular species of turkey is contingent upon there being a whole posse of turkeys who take him seriously]

1. We either have Free Will, which would make telling the future from Celestial Bodies (other than my wife) seem like a deeply, wildly, and breathtakingly fraudulent activity.

2. We don’t have free will, and our level of causal determination would be precisely the same as that of the Planets, unless of course the Planets have free will…
Hey, maybe they just, kind of, like, going around in not-quite circles… who knows?
If we assume that the Planets don’t have free will, and neither do we, then it is still possible that there is a cause-effect relation between Planetary Behaviour and our own, but what direction does the relation flow?
As Robin Williams in The Fisher King demonstrates, this is no easy thing. Maybe our behaviour determines the movement of the Spheres? (perhaps if I concentrate hard enough I can break up clouds with my mind – you’d have to be nude to focus the psychic energies…)
3. Whatever weird and twisted cosmology could be formulated to prop up this chicanery, surely it gets grievously disturbed by the arrival of a UNEXPECTED COMET. To be fair, Comets really messed up Aristotle as well. A practice that pretends to predict the portentous from the regular motions of heavenly bodies takes a fair knock on the head when something shows up out-of-the-blue/black, and not only that, is heading in the wrong direction.
I love you Comet Lulin – you gloriously shiny, silver, turkey bullet.
Ahh, maybe I’m just old and grumpy…
after all, when I was your age Pluto was still a planet.

comet photo by Karzaman-Ahmad

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Immanentism

Themes: Apologetics, Critique, Philosophy, Society

“If there is an intellectual direction in the culture that has developed over the last few centuries it is that which
is rather barbarously labelled ‘immanentism’. That is to say, the phenomenon which at once characterises a culture and sets for Christian theology its central problem is the widely accepted belief that the world can be understood from within itself, and not from any being or principle supposed to operate from without. Examples are to be found everywhere, from the characteristic modern ‘experience’ of being alone in the universe to the brash technocratic optimism that sees in modern knowledge the key to the solution of all problems.” (Colin Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 2-3)

I generally hate generalisations about anything, especially about cultures. But I also (evidently) don’t have a problem with being slightly contrary, so I’ll come out with it and say, I think Our Colin has nailed the cockroach to the wall with this one.
I just wish ‘immanentism’ was slightly easier to pronounce, then I could start accusing all sorts of people of being it.
It certainly seems influential in many Christian attempts to rethink the presentation of the Gospel to our culture (think emergent church), and in the prevalence and brand of eschatology fashionable in theology (think ‘new creation’ rather than ‘heaven’).
You might have to think a while to join the dotted lines, but they are there, and they aren’t that dotty.

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History of Sexuality

Themes: Critique, Ethics, On Power, Philosophy, Reading

You may not be one for gazing adoringly at your own belly-button lint…
…but if Philosophy is your thing and you are interested in thinking through how Christians can engage with our culture about sex and sexuality, then its well worth getting to know Michel Foucault.
French, Post-Modern, Gay, Bracingly Bald.

Ready to just reach out and grab ya!!
(is that a giant lipstick he’s holding?)

Yet, strangely enough, here Christians might find an academic ally.

Foucault is known as a theorist of institutions. His major preoccupation was the flow of power through human relationships in society, and in particular how this affected human knowledge.
He was also a historian (although some would debate this) seeking, in his own phrase, to ‘write the history of the present’. On a basic level this means, that Focault sought to understand modern institutions like prisons, schools, and pyschiatric institutions, through the study of their development and the theoretical discourse that surrounded this development. What did people think about punishment, education, madness? And more important, why has the thinking and talking surrounding these institutions changed over time?
For example, why has our attitude to torture as an acceptable form of punishment been reversed over the course of the last three centuries?

Foucault’s major work was the three volume (unfinished)The History of Sexuality. In it he seeks to trace the development of human thinking about sex through the major periods of Western Civilisation.
It is a fascinating study. Foucault takes us from Classical Greece, through Medieval Christendom, and into the English Victorian period. As a work of history, the value of this study is debatable. Foucault was not a classical scholar and has been repeatedly charged with not being completely on top of his sources.

However, the major contribution of this work is not to our understanding of sexual practice through the ages. Rather, Foucault’s work sets out to demonstrates that people’s thinking about sexual behaviour has changed during different historical periods.
According to Foucault, sex within the classical Greek culture was not theorised as a moral problem but ‘dietetic’, how should a responsible citizen engage in sexual behaviour in a ‘healthy’ way.
A average randy Greek was not asking questions about whether Sex is Good or Evil, but is it Healthy? The primary questions being asked in the relevant Greek literature are for the sake of a healthy life, ‘how much sex should I have, with whom, and when?’

This is transformed with the coming of Christianity. Christians, following their Jewish heritage, regard sex as subject to moral demands.
For Christians, sexual practice is not merely regulated by questions of health and hygiene, instead sexual relations are imbued with a significance that points beyond the simple activity to the will and intention of God. Therefore questions about sex are deeply moral questions.

This might seem rather obvious to you, after all, Christianity as a whole introduced completely new ways of thinking into the pagan world. But Foucault goes beyond this, in fact, his work really only gets interesting when he comes to examine the developments in thinking and talking about sex following the Enlightenment, particularly in Victorian England.

You can really take or leave this historical analysis, Foucault’s reason for going here is primarily to show that our thinking about sex is not set in stone. It is subject to external forces. Foucault’s interest in tracing the development of Sexual Discourse is in seeing how these external factors have operated to produce our current beliefs about sex. He’s engaging in a ‘genealogy’.

Foucault’s analysis points out that through a certain historical period, our society moved from talking about ‘sex’ and started a new form of speech revolving around ‘sexuality’.

This is where his thinking has been most influential and provocative. Foucault argues that while we have always had things to say about sex, ‘sexuality’ is a relatively modern phenomenon. Sexuality joins together sexual behaviour and identity. It’s where we get the notion that heterosexual and homosexual are primary categories of identification.

Foucault’s historical analysis demonstrates that there is no indication at earlier points in Western Civilisation that sex and identity were held together in this way. Rather, sexual behaviour was the outcome of an identity grounded completely elsewhere.

Why is it that we now talk about people as ‘Gay’, rather than People who engage in homosexual practice?

that mon cheroot, is the question…

More to come.

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City Soul

Themes: Critique, Places, Sin, Society, Sydney

There was a interesting article in The Economist recently entitled ‘In place of God‘. It is a survey examining the central cultural institutions of the world’s major cities. The title reflects the shift over the last century away from the Church as the central cultural institution. Leaving aside for a moment the problem with regarding the Church as a cultural institution, it raises an important point about the spiritual dimensions of Cities.

Until last century all the urban communities of the Western world were built around Churches. In Britain, before the 16th century a population centre would only be declared a city if it contained a Cathedral – the seat of a Bishop. But for increasingly secular societies Church no longer holds its place as the hub of urban life. The article goes on to examine some of the substitutes our societies have developed: Art Galleries, Museums, Sporting Grounds. But the secular shrine that has truly come to dominate the spiritual lives of modern suburbanites receives only a brief mention: the Shopping Mall.

It’s probably just my over-active imagination, but there are certain times when I walk into a shopping mall and am overcome with the sense that I’m in the heart of a pagan temple. As a Christian there is so much happening in a Mall that is antithetical to the heart of the Christian message and life. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when I really enjoy wondering ’round the Mall. I certainly take advantage of the convenience provided by having shops grouped together. But I think that the times when I’m repulsed are probably my saner moments. Buying and selling, the manipulation of thoughts and desires through advertising, the manipulation even of biology through the food courts and careful control of natural and artificial light – I feel like a battery hen.

All the windows in a shopping mall only look into shops, never into the landscape or city. It is impossible to know what time of day it is once you’re inside. Increasingly, it is becoming unnecessary to ever leave.

And yet, the mall is a profoundly dehumanising place. It takes People and makes them no more than cattle, consuming and producing. It justifies the manipulation of minds, hearts, and bodies in order to make this process more efficient. A shopping mall is a factory in which we are the product.

The change from Church to Mall is a massive exercise in Urban Idolatry. The substitution of human productions for the reality of God.
And it’s no wonder that this is dehumanising. Man-made gods always treat us like cattle. Idolatry is dehumanising.
We were created to worship God, the more we draw near to him in worship – the more human we become. Worshipping God is an essentially human activity, it is proper to no other species of creature. We are most human when we are act out our humanity towards God. And conversely, being truly godly is truly human. It’s an image thing. We have the identity and intentions of our creator pressed into our identity.
When we worship something other than God we are bending this out of shape. We stop acting in a properly human way. Even though genetic sequences don’t change, idolatry produces monsters – perversions of human identity. Sharing some of its features but twisted in upon itself.

A city is a collective individual. More than anything else humans produce, it is the concrete representation of our identity. When we substitute something other than God at the heart of the city, it also begins to lose its humanity. It loses its civility, its ‘civicness’. It is no longer a community of citizens bonded together for their mutual good. It becomes truly ‘sub-urban’ a disparate herd of individuals isolated from one other, angry and suspicious, quitely ignoring each other, while seeking to beat each other to whatever bargain is now on offer. A city with no soul.

The gospel of the Lordship of Jesus means that we must speak out against the false worship in a city – calling people to give their loyalty to the Christ.
And it also means calling people back to their humanity.
And calling cities back to their foundations.

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Sex and Death

Themes: Critique, Ethics, On Power, Philosophy, Society

Emma and I were walking through the Botanic Gardens last week. It was raining so we were snuggled up under our umbrella. We were on our way to my new favourite Sydney Cafe – the Poolside Cafe at Andrew ‘Boy’ Charlton Pool down on the edge of the water near Lady Macquarie’s Chair. We were worried that the cafe would be closed so Emma rang directory to get the number for the Cafe to check.
At the moment the Gardens are running an exhibition in the pyramid green-house on Orchids and Carnivorous Plants. The garden in front of the green house has been planted out with the name of the exhibition in flowers.
We came round the corner and saw this just as the operator from directory assistance picked up Emma’s call. I read out the name written in the garden, just a little bit too loud, “Sex and Death”…
The operator didn’t miss a beat: ‘what suburb please?’
I should have known that there’d be more than one listing…

I’ve been working on writing a review of The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault, so ideas about sexuality have been rustling round my mind.
The connection between sex and death is striking.

Obviously, there is a biological connection.
Reproductive sex is the mechanism through which we deal, on a biological level, with the problem of death.
It’s easy to take for granted the fact that we are only one generation away from total extinction – a point made with great power in the recent movie, The Children of Men.

But the connection runs deeper, there is a theological connection between sex and death.
Death is subject to a strict taboo in our society. It is in the blushingly Victorian space occupied by sex during the 19th Century. Our culture is marked by the thundering silence we have produced regarding death.
Is it that the secular world feels that it has answered the perennial human questioning about death…

“What happens when we die?”

… And has found the answer is profoundly dissatisfying.

Our way of life, the goods we pursue, the values we endorse, do not really make a great deal of sense in the face of an extinction coming fifteen years after retirement from work. We pile things up as though they are going to last.
… as though we are going to last to enjoy them.

On the other hand, the speech of sex grows louder and louder.
Sex is the coin of the realm. It is in the way we dress, saturates our entertainment, and is essential to our system of trade.
As death has been silenced, tucked politely out of sight. Sex has blossomed into view.

The sexual embrace is a flight from death. The desire to escape death in the power of a sensation, precisely because it is the only form of immortality left to secular humanity. The desire to speak about sex and to trade in sex is a mask for the desire to transgress the taboos surrounding sex, and by breaking the rules to master them.

And whoever masters sex holds the ‘keys of death and hades’.

At this point the Christian worldview could not be more different. Yet not without its own difficulties.
At least initially, there was no connection between sex and death, how does this make sense biologically?
Or was there death before the fall, but a different sort of death? (heresy alert)
And what are we to make of this?

“For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven.” (Matt 22:30 HCSB)

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